July 16, 2013

Ask the Dust (2006) - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-starring Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek,
Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by Robert Towne, based on the novel by John Fante
directed by Robert Towne

by Walter Chaw As a male of the
average
chauvinist-pig variety, you find yourself inclined to give Robert
Towne's Ask the Dust the benefit of the doubt
because he's convinced Salma Hayek to strip naked a few times and roll
around in the surf. And yet the realization dawns inescapable that no
matter the acres of flesh, the film is every bit as horrible as that
self-serious, neo-camp sexploitation classic Original Sin
(another noir based on a lesser-known,
period-dependent novel--that one by Cornell Woolrich, this one by John
Fante), with only the gender/race roles reversed--that watching naked
Angelina Jolie writhe around with Antonio Banderas can be every bit as
disturbingly sexless as Hayek and Colin Farrell doing same. Promising
to follow the James M. Cain pot-boiler formula with its dense
voiceovers and faux-sordid, sepia-stained sexing, Ask
the Dust is actually just inert, a painfully-overwritten,
impossible-to-execute picture loaded down with self-conscious slatted
shadows and mirrors (and all manner of noir affectations)
that isn't only set in 1930s Los Angeles, but plays exactly as
anachronistic and fusty as most films produced in the Thirties, too.
It's the kind of movie that makes much of a character's
English-impaired malapropisms ("Not 'grew on me,' grew in
me...like a baby," mewls Hayek's character in one of many excruciating
proclamations); to its core, it's the kind of movie that sucks now and
always has in exactly the same way.

The first problem is that it's not
about anything. It's not about Los Angeles in the '30s because the
suffering of the starving writer (Arturo Bandini (Farrell)), marooned
in a Barton
Fink hotel oubliette, is antiseptic. Starvation is
something scored to a whimsical Spanish guitar and neatly solved by
squandered drunken weirdo Hellfrick (Donald Sutherland) borrowing two
bits at one point and returning fifteen cents in another, while
Arturo's imminent eviction is mentioned in passing and then forgotten
for a long stretch in-between. It's not about racism because although
there's a lot of it going around in the picture (and in spite of much
protestations as to its importance), it doesn't seem to colour the
characters or their relationships in any meaningful way. It's not about
writer's block because H.L. Mencken, in voiceover (provided by Richard
Schickel, which is, indeed, your first warning), appears to buy
Bandini's scribblings without much editorial insight. And it's not
about love, because the actions and dialogue the erstwhile lovers share
(an exchange about Camilla's (Hayek) shoes seals the deal: "Why,
because they're too good for my legs?" "No, because your legs are too
good for them!") are all alien and, almost without
exception, unintentionally hilarious. It's so bad in a dedicated way
that for much of its running time, Ask the Dust
threatens to become an accidental satire of hardboiled L.A. noir
epics with its gallery of grotesques anchored by a dickless, wholly
unsympathetic ponce.

Farrell is, as usual, simultaneously
fine and invisible (a quality that complements Malick's
transcendentalism, if nothing else), and I've never thought much of
Hayek as an actress save for that one bit with her toes in Robert
Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, but whatever's
wrong with the picture isn't the fault of its players. I will say that
to its credit and for what it's worth, Ask the Dust
is so certain about itself that it never ventures from its absurd
approach into self-awareness, to say nothing of the kind of
fully-justified self-loathing that might have salvaged Towne's
already-foundering reputation. Set around the time of Towne's own
seminal Chinatown
script, it shares with it only that ironclad devotion to its style and
sprung rhythms. In all other respects, it could be positioned as the
exact contrary to it in terms of agility and gravity: the one the
perfect modern screenplay, the other a weird riff on that screenplay
with a chip on its shoulder and trying too damned hard--Herman vs.
Joseph Mankiewicz, for instance, or the old Robert Towne versus the Tom
Cruise-ified middlebrow edition. Ask the Dust is
dreadful stuff, as stale, deluded, and sad as the cot in an old man's
flophouse cubicle. Originally published: March 17,
2006.

THE DVDby Bill Chambers Paramount
brings Ask the Dust to DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic
widescreen presentation. The piece has been transferred with care,
never looking worse than you'd expect it to look; it's impeccable,
actually, and it occurs to me that despite HD being poised to take
over, the qualitative gap between it and standard definition ain't what
it used to be. Atmospherically impressive during street scenes, the
Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is subdued yet crisp, though when all's said
and done, Towne seems fearful of drawing too much attention to the
sound (see: the Sensurround-lite earthquake set-piece), lest it
undermine the film's austerity. On another track, Towne and
cinematographer Caleb Deschanel largely expand on comments made in the
attendant Light Source & Imagery EPK, "The Making of Ask
the Dust" (13 mins.).

In other
words, you're not missing much if you go straight to the latter,
although the first-time collaborators have a nice chemistry (however
reluctant Towne is to reciprocate when Deschanel poses questions for
the listener's benefit) and generally avoid pigeonholing themselves as
any of THE ONION A.V. CLUB's "15 People You Meet
Listening to DVD Audio Commentaries." Part of the problem is that Towne
prepares five or six stock anecdotes per movie and had already pretty
much exhausted the ones he reiterates here on the press circuit for Ask
the Dust, making the featurette the less egregious of two
déjà vus--plus Colin Farrell's typically coarse remarks really break up
the tedium ("I'm sure Fante would have a smile on his face and a
fuckin' bulge in his pants if he knew, you know, and saw the work that
[Salma]'s done"), even if beneath the profanity he's just toeing the
studio line. Previews for Reds, M:I:III,
and Neil
Young: Heart of Gold cue up on startup while the
trailer for Ask the Dust rounds out the
disc. Originally published: July 17,
2006.